Somewhere in Nepal....

It seems this tiny neighbour is far more with the times than we in India are...

Less than a month after Californians overturned a law supporting same-sex marriages, the apex court of nascent Himalayan republic Nepal gave its nod to gay unions.“My eyes were filled with tears when I read the supreme court decision,” said Sunil Babu Pant, Nepal’s first publicly gay lawmaker and a gay rights icon in South Asia. “We, the gay community of Nepal, are the most proud citizens.” Pant’s exultation came after Nepal’s apex court clarified a groundbreaking verdict it had announced last year. The verdict recognized sexual minorities—a community heavily oppressed in conservative, patriarchal Nepal—as “being born such” and entitled them to all the rights and remedies of Nepali citizens. Now, following up on last year’s judgment, the top court asked the Maoist government to form a seven-member committee to study same-sex partnership/marriage acts in other countries and recommend a similar act to the Nepal government. The court also asked the government—that is scheduled to promulgate a new constitution by 2010—to ensure that the language of the new statute does not discriminate against the sexual minorities. The apex court also plumped for transgenders, who have long been abused in the Nepali society for “cross-dressing”. In its judgment, the court ruled that cross-dressing is not a perversion, but an individual’s freedom of expression. Nepal’s beleaguered gay community got a major boost in 2006 with the fall of King Gyanendra’s army-backed government that had clamped down on the community’s rights and seen them join the nationwide public protests against the royal regime. In August 2006, four months after the king’s exit as the head of government, Pant’s gay rights organisation Blue Diamond Society supported the first publicly conducted gay wedding in Nepal of Anil Mahaju, 25, and Diya Kashyap, 21, in Kathmandu. The marriage, however, came unstuck since then with one of the partners being a drug abuser. Although there are no official figures, Pant said there are around 20,000 gay men and 1,000 lesbians in Nepal, a country with a population of about 25 million where gay sex is a crime punishable by up to two years in prison under public offense laws.